So, I have finally fixed this stupid site. I spent years devising plans for rewriting it in lisp, or something, then one day read this essay about perfectionism and decided I was being completely ridiculous. Yes, that is my dog in the header, thank you for asking.
Some would have balked at the prospect of hand editing years of predominantly embarrassing posts, but I soldiered on through good times and bad. I am still messing with the layout and I haven’t even looked at the damn thing in Internet Explorer yet. (If you have IE—I don’t at home—let me know if something is really messed up.)
Evidently, once upon a time I had a career writing a lot of code for various Microsoft platforms. I feel like that part of my life needs to remain there for posterity, even though I am very happily participating in the open source, OMG-scale web world these days.
If I leave those posts there, perhaps someday someone can explain them to me. Very few of them make any sense to me now. I do remember fielding the e-mail from the ignoramus I-banker that prompted me to write Significant Digits for the Inummerate. With a little luck, his life is now ruined forever.
I thought I would miss debugging obscure threading issues, and rooting through core dumps, and staring at disassembly, but I was wrong. I have come to appreciate the sublime beauty of fork, the challenge of writing code for epic scale, having the damn source code, and solving problems that matter to people that are not evil mutants. I haven’t hand-edited XML in two years. Life is beautiful. Hopefully with the whole “blog” issue out of the way I will be able to think of something interesting to talk about.